don't know why I didn't realize that draw, drag, draft are all kinda essentially the same word https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/draught not sure exactly what metaphor is operating to get us to "draw" as "make marks on a surface in order to depict something"? because you're dragging the pencil across the surface of the paper?

@aparrish Perhaps it refers to how we draw forth an image from our imagination out onto a visible surface? But actually I think you got it right, the physical action is we draw our stylus across the surface.

@aparrish I've looked into this and thought about this before, and the conclusion I came to is that "draw" is from "drag". (Recall that graphite pencils are a relatively recent invention; in the Renaissance, if you made a drawing you were probably using silverpoint, and silverpoint is definitely a kind of dragging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverpoint)

@aparrish Perhaps the experience of visual art can sometimes feel like the thing exists already and you are simply bringing it here--literally drawing it out of the internally envisioned reality and into this one. I recently experienced this for the first time.